It's a standard forum function

A mobile version of the website / forum!

Search function for your private messages would be useful too.

This. It's nearly impossible to find relevant posts with the current search system. Even just sorting by date of last post would help.

Also finding my own old threads is nearly impossible. I did discover lately that old questions do linger, but I'd love to be able to find old threads I started.

I wasn't really thinking of the "thank you" or "like" stuff. There are these VBulletin forums where you can rep a user with either positive or negative rep and you can also leave him a comment. The user is the only one who can see who repped him (and why, if applicable) and there's a certain rep limit you can spread in a certain time.
The users then usually have a bar which shows their "rep rank". Don't know if that's any better, but hey...

After looking at the new Witcher forum though, it could be the GOG overhaul may be similar and we'll get a thank you system or something. Which would eliminate rep for good (and especially negative rep).

You can't rep the same user after having done so already in a certain time period, though. And I also like this distinct look, but they could still make a more "sophisticated" version out of it.

A "thank you" or "like" system would be actually pretty good in my opinion, though, there you can always see which posts are liked by which people. And you can't abuse other people with negative rep. Bad posts can just be hidden or reported, then.

All of that rep/thanking stuff sounds too complicated, tbh. My preference would be just having the ability to "high rate" posts, and nothing else. No rep being added here, just a post getting "high rated".

The objective of the thanking/rep system is to show nice someone is for/in the community, right? Then why not have the ability to see all the high rated posts of some user, like how reddit does with the "gilded" section of user profiles.

And no I disagree ^^ I think the forums looks nice as it is, no need to add any bells or whistles.

Better Search
Ignore user function
Lose the rep system totally.

If you keep the rep system, at least let people know who up/down repped them, see the Beamdog Baldurs Gate forum, you can see who tagged your post in different ways.

This is weird and it may prove that rep has nothing to do with the system. I was hanging out in here, the house lost power, quickly came back on, and when I logged back in I was down 2 points. :O Twilight Zone man!

I pretty much agree with what many have said concerning the rep system being broken and inadequate and that it is being heavily abused by a select few random unknown people, presumably via scripts or just manual abuse daily just blindly down-repping people they don't like or posts they disagree with indiscriminately and/or up-repping people they do like, in either case indescriminately and arbitrarily rather than it being an accurate gauge of community sentiment. This has caused a number of people who have a stellar reputation in the forums in the average person's mental image of them, but to have a steadily decreasing "rep" score as someone games the system to try to harm someone else's enjoyment of the forums.

Some of us just don't concern ourselves with the rep score at all such as myself, but it does harm the experience for quite a number of people who do care what their score is simply because it is there. I think this kind of classifies people into the haves and the have nots and is not an accurate representation of one's true reputation. People can be here for a long time and gain a high rep score and then do things that are abusive to others or the system but their score is through the roof and unlikely to ever work against them in any material way, and people with a score of 1 who just created an account or 50 accounts can automate going around up or down repping everyone else maliciously or for their own ends, either way probably deriving amusement and satisfaction from making other people's experiences bad here and then basking in watching everyone get upset about it, and that fueling their desire to continue gaming the system.

Any web forums have a need for some form of moderation in order to prevent spam and other abuses, and to hopefully remove or limit people whom cause unnecessary turmoil for everyone else. The rep system IMHO does not do a good job of doing this in its current form, and it is itself responsible for creating a lot of turmoil for others. The number of people complaining about their rep score going down for no good reason such as offering a giveaway or some other generous deed far exceeds the number of people who are being antisocial or hostile in the community complaining about being downrepped. This is my personal perception from reading the ninja thread and other giveaway threads, and from what I understand it is rampant in the GOG and non-GOG gifting threads, and now the steam giveaways thread as well.

The rep system is both gameable, and only likely to be completely taken over now by those who wish to abuse it for their own amusement and I think it should be either thrown away, or it should be replaced with something less primitive which is well thought out to solve the problems it is put in place to solve, and simultaneously evolves to meet other problems and/or abuses of the system that arise as crafty people attempt to circumvent or manipulate it to their own benefit or amusement. Any kind of rating/ranking system that is present of this nature probably should not have anything visible to the end user, and instead just be a feedback system that is one-way, providing GOG with information that the software can automate handling, and GOG folk can review manually if necessary and approve or change things.

Facebook has a system for hiding posts for example, and reporting offending posts to Facebook, however there are billions of people on Facebook and they wouldn't have the manpower to read every complaint one might file or report, so they don't do that. Instead, people flag a post as being something they do not wish to see, and have the option but not any obligation to further categorize the reason why they don't want to see it. That helps the Facebook software to filter out future content from the person's feed that they likely don't want to see, or to filter individual people out or spam and other things. No harsh action need be taken against people right away for having something some number of people dislike as everyone doesn't necessarily like the same things. But, if someone posts something that is very very offensive, illegal, or otherwise inappropriate then a massive number of people are likely to report it and it can reach a thresshold where either the software itself takes specific actions to try to prevent such in the future, or it triggers a threshhold where a Facebook employee now has a quick review of the report that just came on-radar and can make an executive human decision.

Such a system helps keep the airwaves clear while still letting people be people, and it centers out people who are there just to cause harm and makes them obvious more quickly where they can be dealt with in an appropriate manner to keep things clean. This would solve a lot of the GOG administrative problem side of things with regards to inappropriate posts or highly disruptive posts or people in the forums at least I believe.

The other use of the rep score here by the community has been to use it as a way to filter people trying to abuse giveaways perhaps by making multiple accounts or similar, and while that makes sense it isn't the best possible way to do that, and since the rep system is gameable it doesn't actually work that well IMHO in practice either, and some people may be now being harmed by it due to having a good reputation in the community but an ever decreasing rep score for no reason other than that they post something as simple as "Good morning, hope everyone is having a good day."

I think the community would be better served for tracking reputation of those type of things in a way similar to steamgifts.com and steamrep.com by having goggifts.com and gogrep.com or similar. You gain points by gifting and/or other measureable actions, and people can limit giveaways the create to people who meet certain minimum requirements the system can measure. It works for steamgifts.com it would seem, and I don't see why it wouldn't work for GOG also. The steamrep thing could potentially be gamed I suppose too but it seems to be useful to some degree so far, and that would then be a non-GOG.com problem anyway.

So, the rep system is probably the single biggest failure here in the forums just by my own observation even though I don't really care about rep score personally. An increasing number of people are inappropriately disenfranchised by the system and it is harming the community here more than it helps I believe. This will continue to erode the community here and make for a more hostile social experience if it continues to coast along without being rethought.

Moderation and reputation are two very different things. The current system tries to combine the two, or is at least used in that way in practice despite what it's original intention might be, and therein lay it's failure.

In addition to many of the other things already said, I have three suggestions:

1. Add the ability to send PMs without finding the person's name in the forum.

2. Disable the 10-minute post-merge functionality (or at the least make it an option).

3. Allow editing of thread titles by users (with obviously the ability for mods to lock it if someone continues to add profanity or something to a title).

Another thing, I like the notification about reply posts, but would appreciate if the post link lead to it, instead of just to the thread.

May I do a suggestion?
it would be nice if we can add spoilers button to hide information/spoiler for the instinctive glance/look that everybody can do thoughtlessly. With spoiler button we can avoid ruin future games experience but share the experience with people who already played X game.
Sorry for my bad english

The forum search needs improvements. Like others have said, it needs basic features like sorting by time. In fact, that would possibly be the best improvement to the search.

An actual post history would be nice too. The recent posts page is nice but it doesn't retain every thread you've ever posted in, or where those posts are. It might not sound like a big deal, but in a thread 100+ pages long it is hard to find old posts.

I like the look of the forums though, especially while using the light theme. I hope that doesn't change too much.

I do think the GOG forums do a very good job of self-policing. This is probably the most respectful, helpful, and simply nicest corner of the internet I have ever come across. That said, an abuse of down-repping is clearly occurring leading to diminished happiness and underlying tension. Either the rep system needs an overhaul, or the idiots who apparently rock their jollies by kicking puppies need to be blocked from pressing the down-rep button (via banning or simply button disablement). I don't mean people who down-rep because someone is out of line (which is a perfectly valid use) or even if they disagree with something someone says; I'm talking about those few individuals who are clearly stalking specific people and pressing the little red button every time they say anything (or even say nothing at all). I, personally, have not been affected by such a plague. I have, however, seen valuable, friendly, contributing members of the GOG forums reputation plummet 50-100 points in a few weeks for no known reason.

Otherwise the suggestions others are providing are spot on.

Namely:
Rep System remediation - Yes this bears repeating. See above for reasoning.
Search function improvement - Half the time I end up resorting to googling site:gog.com/forum trying to find anything. Being able to sort results by date would be exceedingly helpful. Also being able to sort by poster's name would be useful.
Preview function for posts - I did not realize how much I missed this until I came here.
Post history - Also very useful. Even personal post history would be appreciated. The endless searching through "Topics I've participated in" five at a time is cumbersome to say the least.
Ability to see who last posted in a topic - Adds to general ease of use of the forums.
Spoiler tags - This is a game forum. These are crucial to not, well, spoiling game twists.
Ability to self-lock threads - Helps kill flamewars before they burn the forums down. Sometimes things just take a turn for the worst and won't stop until it gets way out of hand.

Also as A_Future_Pilot suggests: - This may be outside the scope of the forums, but it would be greatly appreciated.

My sincerest thanks to GOG for opening this line of discussion, and Judas for taking the brunt of it.